People From Bern

"In the United States, the Church has flourished under the republican form of government. In Spanish America, the new conditions have affected the Church more markedly, and not always beneficially, The lack of stability in political conditions of South American States has so often influenced the deportment of their governments towards the Church that sometimes persecution has resulted."

"We probably all agree that eventually reducing a difficult problem to a "nice" situation is at the heart of mathematics."

"Still another important area is Poincaré duality for groups, invented by Robert Bieri and myself. They behave like manifolds: homology, cohomology, you see, in complementary dimensions, but with another dualizing module. Many groups that are interesting in algebraic geometry, group theory or other areas are such duality groups."

"Together with many other people and after a long development I could prove that a Poincaré duality group of cohomological dimension 2 is the group of a Riemann surface. That was actually a conjecture of Jean-Pierre Serre. "You have to prove it!" he had always insisted."

"'Parallelism' can be pointed out in the different parts of a single object, looked at alone; it is even more obvious when one puts several objects of the same kind next to each other. Now if we compare our own lives and customs with these appearances in nature, we shall be astonished to find the same principle repeated.. .When an important event is being celebrated, the people face and move in the same direction. These are parallels following each other.."

"If an object is pleasant, repetition will increase its charm; if it expresses sorrow or pain, then repetition will intensify its melancholy. On the contrary, any subject that is peculiar or unpleasant will be made unbearable by repetition. So repetition always acts to increase intensity. Since the time that this principle of harmony was employed by the primitives, it has been visually lost, and so forgotten. One strove for the charm of variety, and so achieved the destruction of unity.. .Variety is just as much an element of beauty as parallelism, provided that one does not exaggerate it. For the structure of our eye itself demands that we introduce some variety into any absolutely unified object.. .To be simple is not always as easy as it seems.. .The work of art will bring to light a new order inherent in things, and this will be: the idea of unity."

"[in 'Lake Geneva' - Hodler painted c. 1911]..the bands formed by the shoreline, the mountains and their reflection on the surface of the water, together with the three-part rhythmic frieze of clouds, have been composed to form a cosmological whole."

"There are two schools of thought on Ferdinand Hodler. According to one, he was guided by the worst impulses of the Symbolist generation, exploring ill-defined metaphysical questions in canvases that have come to look hopelessly dated and affected. According to the other, his work married a late-Romantic wonder at the natural world with a bold decorative streak.. ..which he shares with contemporaries such as Klimt and Munch."

"Ferdinand Hodler was born into the Swiss proletariat in the poorest quarter of Bern in 1853. His father, an impecunious carpenter, died when the artist was a still a child, and was eventually followed in death by his mother, who was remarried to Gottlieb Schüpbach, a widowed house and sign painter."

"He walked to Geneva without money, without education, with the slightest knowledge of French and without a friend to greet him at his destination. He knew only that Geneva was a cultural center of considerable importance and that it might be a place where, having left behind the sadness of his childhood, he could hope to enter a new life, perhaps as a new person.. .He came from a very isolated place, he was never part of any artistic community, had little tradition to continue or even to rebel against."

"Peter Selz, in his catalog-essay for the Hodler retrospective, at the Guggenheim Museum - New York, 1973; as quoted in 'Housetraining Weird Uncle Ferdinand', Thomas Micchelli; October, 2012"

"The artist's mission is to give shape to what is eternal in nature, to reveal its inherent beauty; he sublimates the shapes of the human body. He shows an enlarged and simplified nature, liberated from all the details, which do not tell us anything. He shows us a work according to the size of his own experience, of his heart and his spirit."

"When I enter a forest of tall fir trees, reaching toward the sky, I am surrounded, right and left, by their trunks, which seem to me like innumerable columns. Around me, one and the same vertical line is repeated endlessly. Th the extend that these tree trunk are clearly distinguished from a murky background, to the extent that they are well delineated from the blue sky, I am impressed with a feeling of unity, of parallelism."

"Vive Vienne. Vive la Secession."

"This beautiful head [of Valentine Godé-Darel], this whole body, like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna - and this nose, this mouth - and the eyes, they too, those wonderful eyes - all these the worms will eat. And nothing will remain, absolutely nothing!"

"I call 'parallelism' any kind of repetition. When I feel most strongly the charm of things in nature, there is always an impression of unity. If my way leads into a pine wood where the trees reach high into heaven, I see the trunks that stand to the right and to the left of me as countless columns. One and the same vertical line, repeated many times, surrounds me. Now, if these trunks should be clearly outlined on an unbroken dark background, if they should stand out against the deep blue of the sky, the reason for this impression of unity is parallelism."

"If a few people who have come together for the same purpose sit around a table, we can understand them as parallels making up a unity, like the petals of a flower. When we are happy we do not like to hear a discordant voice that disturbs our joy. Proverbially, it is said: Birds of a feather flock together. In all these examples parallelism, or the principle of repetition, can be pointed out. And this parallelism of experience is, in expression, translated into the formal parallelism which we have already discussed."

"A History of Economic Theory offers a comprehensive account of the builders and building blocks of modern mainstream economics. Jurg Niehans shows how the analytical tools used by economists have evolved from the eighteenth century to the present. Niehans first surveys the development of classical economics from the scholastic and mercantilist traditions to Marx. He then follows the progress of marginalist economics from Thunen to Fischer. In the book's final section, he describes economic theory in the model-building era from Pigou and Keynes to Rational Expectations."

"There is a widespread impression today that the history of economics is a sequence of revolutions and counter-revolutions, successive schools rising to dominance just to be deposed in a crisis by another school. According to this view, paraphrasing Marx, all history of economics is a history of school struggles, punctuated by revolutions."

"Money is here called the a medium and not, as customary, a unit of account because, clearly, money itself is not a unit, but the good whose unit is used as the unit of account."

"If one could be perfectly certain that everybody always stays within his budget constraint, everybody could be allowed to obtain goods without a specific quid pro quo."

"The equilibrium price level is determined at the point where the money market is in equilibrium. The temporary suspension of Walras' Law, far from making economic nonsense, thus appears as the crucial "trick" by which the tatonnement process is decomposed in two parts. This analysis confirms that for a neoclassical general equilibrium system with neutral money there is indeed a consistent decomposition procedure, based on appropriate compensation principles, permitting the determination of real variables in the real sector while the price level is determined in the monetary sector. However, the amount of intellectual effort which, in the wake of Lange and Patinkin, was devoted to this issue, is entirely out of proportion to its economic significance. The real economic question is not whether a system can be dichotomized, but whether money is neutral."

"Economics should be under no illusion that central banking will ever become a science."